A household name in the Macedonian startup ecosystem, Gorjan Jovanovski has been making waves in environmental tech for years, achieving significant success with his first venture, AirCare. Now, he’s taking things to the next level with EarthCare. 

As a graduate of Techstars ’23, and developed by Jovanovski and his co-founder Dragan Gelevski, the EarthCare platform is designed to change the way how businesses approach the growing threats posed by climate change. With just one click, the platform enables companies to analyze and anticipate the impact of floods, wildfires, storms, and other natural hazards.

In an interview with IT Logs, Jovanovski shares his vision for EarthCare and the impact it could have on businesses and the planet.

IT Logs: What inspired you to tackle climate intelligence specifically, and what was the ‘aha’ moment when you realized that EarthCare.ai could truly make a difference in how businesses approach climate-related risks?

Gorjan Jovanovski: I honestly believe that the biggest challenge and threat of our generation is saving the planet. We already know that we’re deep in the climate crisis, and it will take multiple solutions to reverse what we’ve done to our planet. 

After the success of AirCare, that helped anyone understand a complex topic like air quality, we decided to do the same approach but with much more information about climate and severe weather, and for the business world. Businesses not only are going to be really impacted by the new climate reality, not doing anything about it will cost them more. 

Hence, providing understandable and high quality climate data allows businesses to better plan and mitigate upcoming storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and more.

Your platform allows anyone to act like a climate scientist. How do you envision this democratization of climate data changing industries in the next 5-10 years?

I want to live in a world where anyone makes informed, data-driven decisions, and always takes the climate into account. In business, that means from the CEO, down to the sales person on the ground. Climate data can unlock hidden opportunities not previously visible, can help prepare and mitigate damages and disruptions. The way that Excel democratized analysis of numerical data, EarthCare.ai does the same with climate data.

Why do you believe it’s crucial for companies across sectors like energy, insurance, banking, real estate, retail, and supply chain to integrate climate intelligence into their business strategies today?

Energy companies have massive infrastructure monitoring issues that can be affected by storms (imagine solar farms getting hit by hail). Insurances need to better price policies based on the new reality of severe weather. Banks giving out loans need to better risk-assess if that new factory will get flooded or not. The list goes on, since climate and physical risk affects so many industries around the world, even if they aren’t yet aware of it. Getting a head start gives so many benefits, rather than waiting to start losing money first.

Could you explain how EarthCare.ai’s technology works? What makes your climate intelligence platform different from other solutions in the market?

From the data side, most climate platforms focus on satellites as their single source of data, we go the extra mile to implement multiple sources including radar systems and ground monitoring systems. This not only gives us continuous data, but also lets us have a much better resolution and granularity.

From the model side, we’ve started developing our own threat detection models that are able to transform meteo data into actual detected threats (like floods, storms, droughts, wildfires…), as well as putting together the latest AI forecast models to see well into the future.

From the UX side, we’ve developed a super intuitive platform that can be used without any knowledge on the topic, yet still yield very valuable results. Simplicity is key, think Google, not SAP :)

You emphasize the role of AI in end-to-end climate data analysis. How do you see the balance between AI automation and human insight in decision-making evolving?

Currently, AI is in its infancy. We have models that can do great things, like LLMs and GenAI, but in my opinion, those are just the start. Once climate models are fully developed, like the ones we’re working on, they’ll allow us to have a very accurate picture on our world, the changes to our climate, and give us scenarios on how we can prevent a meltdown of the planet.

There are already AI climate models that can create accurate forecasts for the next 10 days in minutes on a laptop, compared to the conventional physics-based models that take hours running on supercomputers to achieve the same. Yes, AI draws a lot of power, and will set us back at the start in terms of carbon, but when used for the right things, it will give us an enormous ROI and boost forward.

What are some of the biggest challenges you anticipate in the climate intelligence space, and how is EarthCare.ai poised to address them?

Creating the best AI model for a digital twin of our world. That’s the end goal. After that, it’s just running simulations on it to find out what course of action can help us save the planet. The start to that is having all of the world’s climate data centralized in one place, and that is how we’ve started to tackle the problem. EarthCare.ai is the go-to place for climate data, as Google is for search, and Uber is for cabs. Now the main challenge ahead of us is developing and deploying those models ASAP, and that’s why we’re putting together a class-A team to do it.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make an impact in the field of climate technology and sustainability?

It’s a hard battle, be ready for spending a lot of time educating stakeholders about the importance of the topic. But do it. Do it, not because it will be easy (it will get easier). Do it, not because it will make you a millionaire overnight (it will in the long run). Do it because now is the last chance we have to let our kids grow up in a world that isn’t dry, on fire or under water. And with AI, there is no better weapon out there to achieve this goal!

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